alchemy

The ancient art of Alchemy is believed to have been alive in our species since 1900bc, founded by the great Egyptian King Hermes Trismegistus. Because so much is shrouded in here-say it is hard to tell apart the fact from the fiction, especially as Emperor Diocletian ordered the destruction of all Egyptian books relating to Alchemy and other occult sciences, to stem a revolt in Alexandria in the year 296.

What is clear from the few fragments that survived, is that to the ancients, the practice of Alchemy had little to do with making money out of thin air, W B Yates made this point clearly in his work Rosa Alchemica, when he wrote;  “I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.”

An example of this can be found in 35ad, when it was reported that Chang Tao-Ling, the first Taoist Pope “declined all offers to enter the service of the state,” instead preferring to “take up his abode in the mountains where he persevered in the study of Alchemy and in cultivating the virtues of purity and mental abstraction.”

Alchemy is synonymous with a quest for the discovery of the Philosophers Stone, the mythical element that was the secret ingredient required for transforming base matter into gold or silver, and unlocking the secrets of immortality.

But it was not until 8th-century Persian Alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (Latinized as Geber – and from which we get the word gibberish) came along that anyone had ever applied this as a scientific method. Geber theorized that a thorough understanding of the natures and qualities of the basic elements (fire, water, air, earth), combined with a magic “red powder” made from the philosophers stone, would lead to the transmutation of one metal into another.

Many scientific minds of the time rejected the theory, one opponent of Geber’s stating: "Those of the chemical craft know well that no change can be effected in the different species of substances, though they can produce the appearance of such change."

However, during the Middle Ages a crusade began to discover the stone (some going so far as to link it with the wisdoms of King Solomon’s temple).  And “according to legend, the 13th-century scientist and philosopher Albertus Magnus is said to have discovered the philosopher's stone and passed it to his pupil Thomas Aquinas, shortly before his death circa 1280.” Wikipedia

It wasn’t until the 17^th Century when an Alchemist by the name of Robert Boyle wrote a book called “The Skeptical Chymist”, that modern chemistry evolved and eventually disenfranchised itself from the fanciful thinking’s of Geber. But we in the West are a literalist lot, and still we crowd our minds with images of witches and warlocks lurking over bubbling cauldrons whenever we conjure up the word Alchemy.

German theosophist Franz Hartmann wrote in 1902:

“It is erroneous to confuse alchemy with chemistry. Modem chemistry is a science dealing only with the outward manifestations of matter. It never produces anything new. One can mix, compose and decompose two or three chemical substances any number of times, and make them reappear in different forms, but in the end there is no increase in substance; there is only the combination of the substances used at the outset. Alchemy neither composes nor mixes: it increases and activates that which already exists in a latent state. Therefore alchemy can be more accurately compared with botany or agriculture than with chemistry. In fact, the growth of a plant, a tree or an animal is an alchemical process taking place in the alchemical laboratory of nature and conducted by the Great Alchemist, the active power of God in nature.”

It is such a beautiful idea when the transmutation of lead into gold is presented as an analogy for personal transmutation, from the mundane into the spiritual, or the ignorant into the enlightened.  It is a gorgeous idea that our ancestors have left us to consider: that we were all born with unlimited potential, and as Gerhardt Dorn said, all have the power to “transmute themselves from dead stones into living philosophical stones.”